1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a device for mounting terminals on a connector housing of a wire harness used for an automobile.
2. Description of Related Art
An example of a connector C used for a wire harness is shown in FIGS. 20(a) and 20(b). This connector C is composed of an upper housing C.sub.1 and a lower housing C.sub.2. As shown in FIG. 20(a), crimp-style terminals t are mounted on (inserted into) predetermined cavities b of the housings C.sub.1, C.sub.2, which will collectively be referred to as a connector C hereinafter, and the crimp-style terminals t are connected (crimped) with electrical wires a that are part of a wire harness. As shown in FIG. 20(b), the upper housing C.sub.1 is engaged with the lower housing C.sub.2 when the cover C'.sub.1 is rotated to a closed position.
When the terminals t are automatically mounted on connector C, it is common that the terminals t are cut off from a terminal hoop T and individually inserted into the cavities b as shown in FIG. 20(a).
In the conventional example of an automatic mounting device for automatically mounting the terminals t on a connector C, the terminals t, the number of which is predetermined corresponding to the number of the cavities of connector C, are cut off all at once from the terminal hoop T, and the terminals t are inserted into the corresponding cavities b all at once. Although productivity of this automatic mounting device is high, it is impossible to apply this mounting device to different connectors C having a different number of cavities b (the number of poles). Consequently, in production, the conventional mounting device can be applied only to a limited number of terminal configurations.
Recently, the number of different types of connectors that are produced has tended to increase while the number of connectors of the same type that are produced has tended to decrease. Therefore, when the above conventional mounting device is used, production costs will likely be greater than with use of the proposed device.